An article in the USA Today Science Fair blog highlights a study published online in Nature Geoscience. Researchers from Rice University, UC-Santa Cruz and the University of Hawaii at Manoa dare to challenge the State Religion scientific dogma (now there’s an oxymoron for you) that the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere alone is sufficient to predict increases in global average temperature. The USA Today blog is quoted below the fold.

It is noteworthy that the science of Geology is underrepresented among the ManBearPig crowd. You have plenty of Chemists, Physicists, Economists and Phrenologists but darned few Geologists among advocates of Global Warming. That’s because an understanding of the Earth’s time scale — billions of years — is a fundamental component of Geology. From a Geologic perspective, the time span of a human life or even human existence is an imperceptible blink of an eye. In Earth Science, there’s no such thing as a static “normal” condition for sea level, the atmosphere, the climate or temperature. There have been innumerable cooling/warming cycles in Earth’s history, each accompanied by massive changes in sea level. Humans can’t possibly be blamed for any of the historic warming/cooling episodes, so why are we The Prime Suspect for the one we’re supposedly experiencing now?

[Just this week I submitted eight signed petitions, including mine, to the Global Warming Petition Project, which to date has collected the signatures of nearly 31,500 graduate scientists and engineers who have registered their skepticism on the subject of Global Warming. Represented among our group of new signees are four geoscientists (all four have graduate degrees in Geology and one has a PhD in Astrophysics) and four engineers (all with considerable training in geologic science). The average level of experience of the eight is over thirty years each. Our professional lives revolve around the application of what we know about Earth Science. And it is our collective opinion that, from an Earth Science perspective, the pseudo-religion of Global Warming makes no sense.]

“In a nutshell, theoretical models cannot explain what we observe in the geological record,” says oceanographer Gerald Dickens, study co-author and professor of Earth Science at Rice University in Houston. “There appears to be something fundamentally wrong with the way temperature and carbon are linked in climate models.”

During the warming period, known as the “Palaeocene-Eocene thermal maximum” (PETM), for unknown reasons, the amount of carbon in Earth’s atmosphere rose rapidly. This makes the PETM [approx. 55 million years before present] one of the best ancient climate analogues for present-day Earth.

As the levels of carbon increased, global surface temperatures also rose dramatically during the PETM. Average temperatures worldwide rose by around 13 degrees in the relatively short geological span of about 10,000 years.

The conclusion, Dickens said, is that something other than carbon dioxide caused much of this ancient warming. “Some feedback loop or other processes that aren’t accounted for in these models — the same ones used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for current best estimates of 21st century warming — caused a substantial portion of the warming that occurred during the PETM.”